This invention refers to an innovative structure for the orderly disposition and storage of containers.
In the known technique, the problem of receiving, arranging, storing and shipping large quantities of containers is well known. For example, in ports, loading and unloading containerships is a long and tedious operation and very often creates serious logistic problems. In fact, it is preferable for the loading and unloading of the ship to be carried out within the shortest time possible. The order in which the containers are unloaded hardly ever coincides with the order in which the various containers must be withdrawn from the receiving structure and vice versa, both as regards withdrawal times and as regards the means of transport (by road, rail, etc.) Attempting to at least partially rearrange the containers while unloading them however results in a considerable slowing down of the unloading operations.
One of the container storage structures suitable for large and very large quantities is the classical storage yard, where the containers are stacked up while waiting to be shipped to their final destination. The use of a storage yard as a depot is useful in order to reduce the structuring required for the warehouse and in order to optimize the space occupied and the cost of handling and equipment.
However, stacking up containers leads to the disadvantage of making it extremely difficult to withdraw and discharge a particular container if it is not at the top of its respective stack. In storage yard depots it is consequently imperative to rearrange the containers.
This, however, considerably slows down the operations of unloading into the depot and tends to reduce the number of containers per stack, resulting in an increase in the size of the storage yard.
In the known technique depots for containers have also been proposed which enable them to be inserted and removed from the depot in a non sequential order. This is achieved by means of complex honey-combed structures, composed of a plurality of cells among which transelevators move to withdraw and insert containers into the cells. In this way it is possible to achieve independence between the order of insertion and the order of withdrawal of the containers into and from the depot.
In modern terminals, the number of containers to be stored is frequently very high (even as many as several thousand containers) and structures of this kind are consequently very difficult to produce, both because of the equipped areas that they have to occupy and because of the lack of efficiency of the handling equipment which would have to travel over very long distances, both vertical and horizontal, within very short spaces or time.
As the number of containers increases, these cellular depots rapidly become uneconomical and somewhat inefficient, especially as far as the travelling lift is concerned.
The general scope of this invention is to obviate the above-mentioned problems by providing a storage structure or integrated depot, which enables the containers to he very rapidly received and efficiently rearranged, and which at the same time enables an extremely large number of containers to be stored at relatively low cost and with limited requirements in terms of handling equipment.